By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

This book is an account of the phonology and morphology ofthree reduplicative morphemes in Lushootseed, a nearlyextinct Central Coast Salish language of Washington state(United States). Urbanczyk's University of Massachusettsdissertation (with some work done at the University ofBritish Columbia) was finished in 1996, and this book is asubstantially unrevised version of her thesis (apart fromupdating references, and adding an appendix containing thecorpus of reduplicated forms). The Lushootseed data wasextracted from a dictionary, with some acoustic informationverified from archived tapes.

U's overall approach is based on Optimality Theory (OT),specifically on a (sub-)theory of OT called 'GeneralizedTemplate Theory' (GT), proposed by McCarthy and Prince.Briefly, GT holds that reduplicative morphemes areunspecified for either 'segmentism' (melodic content) orphonological shape (syllable, foot etc.); rather, aparticular reduplicative morpheme's phonological shape isdetermined by its 'morphological classification' as a root,prefix or suffix. Reduplicative morphemes acquire a shapebased on the default shape of a morpheme of that class (andtheir melodic content by copying, apart from any fixedcontent they may have).

U's goal is to support GT by showing that the phonologicalproperties of the three Lushootseed reduplicative morphemesare derivable from this minimal information (together witha specification of the morpheme's alignment with respect toits base), and from the general constraint ranking of thelanguage. In particular, it is not necessary to specify inthe lexicon each reduplicant morpheme's shape; nor, in thecase of infixes, is it necessary to specify in the lexicalentry where that infix appears relative to the rest of thestem (at least in this case).

U uses the Lushootseed data to argue several furthertheoretical points of OT, and GT in particular. OT uses afamily of 'Faith' constraints, which require the outputform of a morpheme to resemble some other form. Forordinary morphemes, the Faith constraints match the outputform against the input (lexical) form of the morpheme, andhence are collectively called Input-Output Faith (IO Faith)constraints. But for reduplicative morphemes, the match isbetween the 'base' (the form from which the affix iscopied) and the output; hence the constraints are referredto as Base-Reduplicant Faith (BR Faith). These Faithconstraints form OT's 'Correspondence Theory', and U showshow the Lushootseed data support this sub-theory.

A second point of GT which U argues for, is that the Faithconstraints must be split between faithfulness of roots,and faithfulness of affixes; root faith is universallyranked higher (more important) than affix faith. Andthirdly, U looks at a phenomenon which has become known inthe OT literature as 'emergence of the unmarked', in whichreduplicative morphemes tend to conform to the phonologicalconstraints of the language more than do ordinary morphemes(which may contain phonemes which are unusual in thelanguage, or which violate other well-formednessconstraints of the language).

Chapter one, 'Reduplication and Optimality Theory', setsthe stage by briefly reviewing the history of analyses ofreduplication within generative linguistics, culminating inGT. The chapter closes with a very brief overview ofLushootseed phonology and morphology.

The second chapter, entitled simply 'Shape', shows how GTdetermines the phonological shape of the threereduplicative morphemes: a diminutive prefix; aninfix/suffix glossed as 'out of control'; and a bound rootglossed 'distributive'. Taking the diminutive first, giventhat it is lexically listed as an affix, a (presumably)universal constraint implies that it should be no more thanone syllable in length. Many morphemes which have beencalled affixes in earlier studies of Lushootseed are longerthan one syllable, but U argues that most of theseexceptions are actually roots, and that the majority oftrue affixes in Lushootseed are monosyllabic. (Theconstraint is in any case violable.) U attributes the factthat the diminutive prefix is CV (not CVC) to the inherentmarkedness of codas, a fact embodied in a constraint.

The 'out of control' affix, on the other hand, is VC. Uattributes this to the fact that it is suffixal, ratherthan prefixal. This interacts with the constraint rankingof Lushootseed to determine the shape: it must be vowel-initial, because if it were consonant-initial, it would adda coda to the word (roots being predominantly consonant-final); and it must be consonant-final, because its rightedge is &quot;anchored&quot; to (roughly, copied from) the right edgeof the base, which is itself consonant-final.

An interesting result here is that there are tworeduplicative affixes, both of which should--in the absenceof other constraints--have identical shapes, namely thedefault shape of an affix. The difference in their shapes(CV vs. VC) is due to the interaction of their differentalignments (prefixal vs. suffixal) with other constraints.

Accounting for the position of 'out of control' affixis more difficult. For CVC stems, the affix acts as asuffix. With CVCC stems, it behaves like an infix,immediately preceding the final consonant, which U arguesresults from the constraint minimizing coda consonants.With CVCVC stems, it again behaves like an infix, usually(but not always) attaching after the first CVC. U'sanalysis in this case is that the reduplicative affix&quot;attempts&quot; to match a maximal stretch of the base. At thesame time, it must be no larger than one syllable (asdiscussed above), and it must be &quot;anchored&quot; at the rightend of the base. Since reduplication in the context of aCVCVC base cannot simultaneously satisfy all three demands,a lower ranking constraint must 'give'. U proposes thatwhat gives is the right-most anchor constraint: by infixingafter the first CVC of the base, the affix in effect breaksthe base into two separate bases, namely the initial CVCand the final VC. By appearing after the first base, it isonly required to match that base, which means that the VCaffix is just one consonant shorter than the (left-hand)CVC base, thereby matching against a maximal stretch of thebase. This analysis strikes me as ingenious--perhaps tooingenious. Why should a discontinuous base count as twobases, only one of which need match against thereduplicant? It also implies that either children are veryclever, or there are some very peculiar provisions inuniversal grammar for reduplication (more on this later).

Another oddity of U's analysis is that in effect, there isa conspiracy of constraints which cause the affix to attach(usually) after the first CVC: a different constraintinteraction forces this result in each case of CVC, CVCC,and CVCVC roots. One of the arguments in favor of OT andagainst traditional rule-based analyses was that differentrules conspired to cause a general effect (such as adesired syllable structure), missing the generalizationthat the language was 'aiming for' the general effect. Itseems that conspiracies have re-surfaced in OT, this timeconspiracies of conditions.

An alternative analysis might be that the 'out of control'affix attaches after the stressed syllable, which is thefirst syllable in nearly every case in the data corpus. Urejects this analysis on two grounds: first, the initialCVC is not necessarily a syllabic constituent, since itssecond consonant may be the onset of the followingsyllable. One should not be too hasty in accepting thisargument, it seems to me, until the issue ofambisyllabicity is decided. Second, when a CVCVC stem isstressed on the second syllable, U points out that theinfix attaches in some words after the first CVC, and inother words after the second CVC. But the entire corpus ofCVCVC stems with second syllable stress and taking thisaffix is only four words, evenly split between affixingafter the first and second CVC--two words each! This seemslike a very tiny amount of data to base such a strong claimon. Moreover, so far as I can tell, U's analysis fairs nobetter on these four words than the alternative: bothanalyses get two words right, and two wrong. In summary, Ibelieve the alternative analysis is at least as plausibleas U's analysis. (It also avoids the conspiracy effectmentioned above.)

The third reduplicative morpheme, glossed 'distributive',is often used as a plural. It attaches to the left end ofthe base, copying the first CVC. U argues persuasively thatthis morpheme is a (bound) root, that its CVC shape is thedefault shape of roots in Lushootseed, and that itsprefixal position is consistent with that of a set of'ordinary' bound roots.

The third chapter is entitled 'Syllables, Stress, andSyncope.' Many Lushootseed words have clusters of twovoiceless obstruents root-initially. U argues that despiteappearances, these obstruents are in separate syllables:the first belongs to a syllable whose nucleus is avoiceless vowel, sometimes transcribed as aspiration.

Stress, she argues, tends to fall on the most sonorousvowel (/a/, if present); unstressed /a/s tend to deletewhere possible, else to reduce to schwa. There are twosorts of exceptions to the latter generalization: someunstressed /i/s and /u/s delete, and some unstressed /a/sneither reduce nor delete. U's proposal for the latter caseis that the exceptional stems which retain unstressed /a/shave a different constraint ranking, which seems to me aquestionable move. (However, I must admit that exceptionsare difficult in any theory of phonology. Derivationaltheories have a variety of ways of handling exceptions,including strata, exception features, and various theoriesof prespecification vs. underspecification, which may beseen as an embarrassment of riches.) U mentions somepossible solutions for the unexpected deletion of some /i/sand /u/s, but in the end leaves these cases unresolved.

Chapter four, 'Default Segmentism', concerns an unexpected/i/ vowel that appears in the diminutive and 'out ofcontrol' (but not the distributive) reduplicative affixeswhen these are stressed. The generalization (described inearlier work by Dawn Bates) is that the epenthetic /i/vowel appears when copying the base's vowel fails. Onecircumstance in which copying fails, is when the base vowelis long. U proposes that &quot;Lack of copying satisfiestransfer because if there is no corresponding vowel,whether its length is preserved or not is a moot issue...withan epenthetic segment in [the diminutive affix], there isno corresponding vowel and transfer is vacuously obeyed&quot;(page 133). This once again strikes me as odd (although Ido not have a better explanation). Length (in the form of amora or a branching rhyme) is presumably part of theprosodic structure. But prosodic structure (andparticularly syllable structure) is often not copied underreduplication. At any rate, U's analysis does nicelycollapse the various situations where copying fails, andthe epenthetic /i/ appears. Her explanation for why theepenthetic /i/ does not appear with the distributivereduplicative morpheme, is that the latter is a root (asdiscussed above), and roots in general are able to supportmore marked structure than affixes.

U points out that a consequence of this analysis ofepenthetic /i/, is that epenthetic segments must beassigned to a particular morpheme, even when they appearbetween two morphemes. One of the arguments againstexplicit morpheme boundaries in early versions ofgenerative phonology, was that epenthesis to the left orright of a morpheme boundary was arbitrary. In light of U'sanalysis, it may be worth re-visiting these earlierarguments.

A word in Lushootseed can contain more than onereduplicative morpheme; such words are the topic of chapterfive, 'Double Reduplications and the Base.' The base of theouter reduplicative morpheme is the entire stringconsisting of the root plus the inner reduplicativemorpheme. That is, the base in Lushootseed isphonologically, not morphologically, determined.

In certain configurations, the vowel of the (outer)distributive affix unexpectedly contains the vowel /i/,rather than copying the schwa of the root. U argues thatthis happens when the (inner) diminutive morpheme containsthe epenthetic /i/ (as described earlier), and shows howthis is accounted for by the constraint ranking. (In aderivational theory, this might be accounted for by cyclicrule application.)

In this same configuration (distributive-diminutive-root),the distributive morpheme appears as a CV, rather than itsusual CVC; this is attributable to antigemination. (Uassumes that it is the distributive's final C that does notshow up, rather than the diminutive's initial C. It is notclear to me that there is a principled basis for thisdecision, or indeed that it cannot be left ambiguous.)

In the way of typos, the accent (stress) marks arecrucially missing from the polysyllabic examples of (46b)on page 150, making it difficult to follow the argument inthe text. Occasionally footnotes are misnumbered; footnote37 on page 97 should be 35, while footnotes 51-53 on pages109-110 should be numbered 49-51. The second and thirdsentences immediately after example (26) on page 184 appearto be in the wrong order. There are in addition asubstantial number of misspellings and other typos in theEnglish text, none which should cause confusion.

While the focus of this work is on phonology, notsemantics, I would have found it helpful if each morphemein the Lushootseed examples had been glossed, in additionto the word-level glosses. One can decipher how a threemorpheme word might be glossed 'gravel' ((12b) page 177),but morpheme level glosses would have made it easier.

The index is not particularly complete; in particular, notall constraints are indexed. (A summary listing of all theconstraints, together with their relative ranking wherethat can be determined, would also have been useful.)

Overall, U has thrown light on a very interesting set ofdata, and made some innovative suggestions for how thatdata might be accounted for. If I am not wholly convincedby her argumentation, it is nevertheless an interesting andthought-provoking analysis, and one which others working onreduplication will want to look at closely. In thiscontext, the last sentence of her preface seemsappropriate:

If I contradict my thesis now or in the future, it simply means that my teachers and colleagues have done a good job, and I am still looking for explanations of the explanation.

I would like to add a few paragraphs about the generaltreatment of reduplication in OT. While it is possible thehuman language learning faculty is innately endowed withconstraints specific to reduplication (the Base-ReduplicantFaith constraints), this seems (to me, at least) unlikely.

Nor does it seem likely that every child learning alanguage with reduplicative morphology makes up theconstraints from scratch (since not even the mostintelligent linguists agree on the correct formulation ofsuch constraints). That is, both the radical innatistposition and the radical empiricist position seem flawed.

What both these positions (as I have described them) shareis the notion of a Base-Reduplicant (BR) constraint set.Perhaps the problem is in this set of constraints. I amreminded of Chomsky's view of parasitic gaps: it isunlikely that there are special provisions in UniversalGrammar (UG) for parasitic gaps. Rather, parasitic gaps arethe 'accidental' result of the working together of otheraspects of the grammar. I suspect it is the same withreduplication; there are no special provisions in UG for BRconstraints; rather the resemblance of tokens ofreduplicative affixes to their respective bases is theresult of some other constraints--constraints (or processes)which are operative in more common situations, perhapsincluding ordinary phonological assimilation.

While this review is not the place to present a fleshed outalternative analysis dispensing with BR constraints, I willsuggest a direction which may be worth exploring. Supposewe do eliminate BR constraints. We may retain U's (andOT's) treatment of reduplicative morphemes as minimalistmorphemes, i.e. morphemes with no phonological content,merely a category which determines their phonologicalshape, and whose melodic content is the result of &quot;using&quot;the base's melody.

The difficulty for this approach is accounting for what U(and McCarthy and Prince in work on which U's thesis wasbased) refer to as &quot;the emergence of the unmarked&quot;, aresult which is accounted for by universally ranking IO-Faith above BR-Faith, and by allowing phonologicalconstraints to be ranked between these on a language-particular basis. But if as I have suggested BR-Faith doesnot exist, then it clearly cannot be ranked differentlyfrom IO-Faith. I would suggest that the reduced ranking offaith for reduplicative morphemes should instead ariseautomatically from the 'parasitic' nature of their relationto the base, in the same way that segments which haveassimilated to other segments have a parasitic relationshipwith features of those other segments. Putting thisdifferently, IO-faith corresponds to a direct relationshipbetween the features of some segment in the input and inthe output; but parasitic faith (both in reduplication andin assimilation) represents the situation in which theoutput features of some segment depend on the inputfeatures of some other segment, through spreading orcopying. It is the indirect relationship of this parasiticfaithfulness that makes it somehow less 'important' (andmore susceptible to being overridden by other constraints)than direct faithfulness.

I will also make a few final comments which do not have todo with Urbanczyk's book directly, but rather with thestatus of endangered languages. It seems clear thatreduplication offers insights into the human languagefaculty that we cannot obtain in any other way, and thatdifferent forms of reduplication have different stories totell us. At the same time, reduplication is at bestsporadic in most major languages. The theoretical insightsworked out by Urbanczyk would have been virtuallyimpossible to come by had it not been for the detailed workof descriptive linguists like Thom Hess, Dawn Bates, andothers, not to mention the willingness of the Lushootseedpeople themselves to share their language. I hope thatlinguists and native speakers will be as careful topreserve other endangered languages for future study, bothfor the intrinsic value of those languages and the culturesthey represent, and for the light they can throw on thehuman language capacity.

Mike Maxwell works in the morphological and phonologicalgrammar development for the Linguistic Data Consortium. Hehas a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University ofWashington.